Rebekah Gave Jacob a Second Blessing No One Else Knew About

Everyone remembers the blessing Isaac gave to Jacob. The disguise, the goat-skin on the arms, the bowl of savory stew that tasted like the one Esau would have brought. Isaac reached out and felt the rough skin and gave the blessing meant for his other son. That story is in Genesis (27:27-29), and it has been told and argued over for three thousand years.

The blessing Rebekah gave Jacob afterward is less well known. It is not in the Torah at all. It lives in the Book of Jubilees, composed around the second century BCE and preserved among the apocryphal texts, and it reads like something the Torah was not told: a second blessing, given in private, by a woman who had been carrying the weight of prophecy since before her sons were born.

In that account, after Isaac had blessed and after the household had absorbed the shock of what had happened, Rebekah laid her hands on Jacob's head and spoke her own blessing over him. She invoked the angels who keep God's servants in all their ways, who bear them up so their feet do not strike stone, who clear the path of lions and serpents. She invoked the protection of the One whose name Jacob knew, and she asked that protection to surround him.

And then the holy spirit spoke through her, adding to her blessing: God would answer Jacob when he called. God would be with him in trouble. God would deliver him and honor him. Long life would satisfy him.

This is not Rebekah improvising a farewell. This is Rebekah transmitting something that has come through her. The Book of Jubilees is careful to distinguish the two: her words, and then the holy spirit's addition. She says what a mother says. Then something beyond her speaks through the same voice.

The Ginzberg tradition records that Rebekah had not even heard the conversation between Isaac and Esau that set the blessing plot in motion. The holy spirit revealed it to her directly. She did not act out of maternal favoritism, or not only out of that. She acted on knowledge that arrived through a channel Isaac did not have access to. She was ahead of the story, as she almost always was, because the story had been shown to her before it happened. The night the holy spirit told her to send Jacob in to receive Isaac's blessing, she said: this night the storehouses of dew are unlocked, the celestial beings sing, it is the night set apart for the deliverance of your children from Egypt. She was not improvising. She knew the calendar of holy moments.

The tradition in Jubilees also records that Rebekah made Jacob and Esau swear to each other before she died: Esau would not hate Jacob, Jacob would not take vengeance. She died that same night, having extracted from both sons the promise of peace she had been trying to arrange since she received Shem's prophecy about them in the womb. The blessing she gave Jacob on the night he left for Laban's house was her last recorded act as a mother. Jacob walked out under a sky full of angels. She stayed behind and arranged the peace she knew would not hold and died before she could see it break.

The text says she died at one hundred and thirty-three years old. It does not say she died peacefully, though by that point she had done everything the prophecy asked of her. She had held Shem's secret for decades. She had acted on it at the moment it required action. She had sent Jacob away with two blessings: one his father gave him by touch, and one she gave him by the voice of the spirit that moved through her.

The Ginzberg account describes the holy spirit resting on Rebekah when she gave this blessing, her hands on his head, the words coming out of her in a form that was no longer entirely her own. The image is of a woman who had been the vessel of divine knowledge since before her children were born, spending that knowledge at the last possible moment, sending it forward with the son who would carry it.

Jubilees records one final detail that gives the blessing scene its full weight. When Rebekah made Jacob and Esau swear peace to each other that night, she did not have the luxury of enforcing anything. She was extracting a promise from two men who had been competing since the womb, from a position of no power except the authority of a mother at the end of her life. She died that night. The oath she extracted held for a while. The brothers met again years later, and on the surface it was peaceful. But the deeper conflict did not end. The Ginzberg tradition records that Jacob feared Esau until the end of his life, and Esau’s descendants made war on Jacob’s for centuries after both of them were gone.

Jacob left Beersheba that night toward Haran. He would stop at Bethel, sleep on a stone, dream of a ladder with angels going up and down, and wake to receive the divine promise directly for the first time. He arrived at that encounter already double-blessed: by his father who thought he was Esau, and by his mother who knew exactly who he was.